Swans on Tea

Who Watches the Watchman?
Let’s say you own a big building full of valuable stuff. How do you make sure that the night watchman patrolling your factory floor or museum galleries after closing time actually makes his rounds? How do you know he’s inspecting every hallway, floor, and stairwell in the facility? How do you know [...]

Super clocks: More accurate than time itself
An article discussing the progression of atomic clock technology, and also relating to something I posted earlier, a discussion of what happens when the next generation of atomic clocks is deployed: the clocks won’t be the limiting factor in determining the time.
To tell the time consistently, all clocks [...]

Clock for geeks

I was listening to a podcast recently that delved into timekeeping and atomic clocks, and was surprised that they got a couple of details wrong. I haven’t done a post explaining how atomic clocks work, because that’s something easily found on the intertubes, and so I’m not particularly motivated to recreate Wikipedia or HowStuffWorks.
But [...]

Here comes the sun, or at least its shadow, at Dot Physics: When is the Sun directly overhead?
There’s a nice little video that accompanies the post which also demonstrates some of the foibles of doing experiments
What I want to do is change the question a little bit. Rhett points out that one of the [...]

Top 10 techno-calendars for 2009

What Do Timekeepers Do?
On New Year’s Eve at 6:59:59 p.m. ET, an “international consortium of timekeepers” will add one second to the world’s clock. How do you get to be an official timekeeper?
Earn a Ph.D. in astronomy and move to France. Tweaks to the official clock are announced by the Earth Orientation Center, a Paris-based [...]

Happy return to an arbitrarily chosen starting point in the orbit about our gravitational enslaver

Blake’s mention of a “First Night” celebration in Boston, coupled with memories of many stories about similar celebrations in upstate New York (Albany and Saratoga), have triggered this.
The problem: “First Night” celebrations are held on New Year’s Eve, which is the LAST night of the year. I mean seriously, WTF? After midnight, [...]

… but it bothers a geek like me. Yeah, another leap second story. I suspect these will propagate, but like a game of “whisper” the errors will compound. Three…Two…One…One…Happy New Year!
They mention THE atomic clock (ha! there are many atomic clocks) and cesium clock/standard, but the picture is of a mercury ion [...]

Wait a second: 2008 gets extended by timekeepers
I already announced this, but noticed this blurb:
At the Naval Observatory they have a party at 6:59:60 p.m.
“We watch the clock and make sure nothing breaks,” Chester said. “It’s an early New Year’s celebration.” A brief one.
That’s right. There’s a party that lasts all of one second. [...]

Ceiling Clock
Message in a clock ensemble
More than 500 clocks; every 12 hours the collection aligns into a readable message.